Separate Scene Storytelling

Stories being told, read, or testified are often shown as separate scenes from the rest of the work.

This is because while it's often okay to just see someone telling these, or point the camera at a page (and thus this does not run into Show, Don't Tell), doing it for too long would just grind the action to a halt (or even be longer than the work trying to tell the story). Thus seeing the story being acted out keeps the story entertaining within the work.

While these scenes can involve a separate cast from the main work, they can also involve a Universal Adaptor Cast.

Characters to whom the story is being told, may do some Leaning on the Fourth Wall as they often understand and talk about elements from the visual scene never actually mentioned by the story-teller. This may be due to bad writing, or done intentionally for laughs.

This can overlap with: Dream Sequence (if someone falls asleep when a story is told), Flash Back (when the story being shown is something that happened in the past), Framing Device (if the story being shown is the main point of the work).

Contents

Anime and Manga

Pokémon, in the Victini and Zekrom/Reshiram movies: The story of the two princes and the dragons is told in-universe with an elaborate pop-up book, but is mostly shown to the viewer as separate scenes.

Film - Animated

Film - Live Action

The Princess Bride: When the grandfather starts reading to the child, the action changes to the story.

The film version of Harry Potter uses this for "The Tale of Three Brothers" section.

The 1995 film adaptation of Les Misérables was set in France during the Nazi occupation, and the main characters, inspired by acts of heroism from the novel, would play out their own lives as if they were the characters. This meant some sequences of the novel would be dramatically played out on screen (with the actors from the Nazi era playing the characters), some scenes where the action in the 1930s paralelled events and actions from the novel, and other ways as well.

Literature

The Neverending Story played with this. It looked like it was only this at first, and then it turned out the story wasn't just a story.

Technically the whole of How I Met Your Mother is this trope, but there are also numerous internal examples, some where the whole episode is a story someone's telling.

Happy Days: Several examples, including one where Richie's great-uncle tells him about his cousin, who was a crusading DA trying to shut down speakeasies in 1920s Chicago. Richie plays the DA, Mr. C plays the speakeasy owner, Mrs. C plays a Carrie Nation type, Al is the Dumb Muscle for the local gangster (Fonzie), etc.

Newspaper Comics

Theatre

Man of La Mancha does this for most of the film, with the characters acting out the tale of Don Quixote in jail and that cutting to seeing them all in the desert/inn/house they were pretending to have.

A later season Alvin and The Chipmunks episode did this with Treasure Island (although it was very lose with the plot). There was a blackout, and Dave read them the book while the power was out. The scenes were the chipmunks playing three of the characters, but with the rest of the roles being original people.

An episode of Daria was about Daria trying to write a story for class, and her attempts were shown this way, ranging from a Shout-Out to The Graduate, to a Jane Austen spoof, to a future Daria hoped would happen.

In "Lyle the Kindly Viking", a Veggie Tales episode, Archibald Asparagus begins reading the story from a pop-up book before the view zooms in and we see the story fully animated.